Exploration of place names

This article originally appeared in issue #4 of the Silly Linguistics magazine

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By Edward Bedford

Place names can often reveal a surprising amount about the language and politics of an area. This is perhaps most obvious when places have been renamed in a different language (such as Istanbul which used to be Constantinople), and this is normally done to show a political change. Place names can also show which language, and so often which ethno-political group, was dominant in an area. A great example of how a city’s name is often changed into the language of the political elite is the Romanian City of Alba Iulia.

There are too many names to fully detail, yet one can understand the point by considering the early Slavic name Balgrad, the Hungarian name Gyulagehervar and the Germanic Weissenburg. All of these names mean “the white city” (albeit the Hungarian adds the descriptor “of Gyula”). Although this is a fascinating subject to explore, I find effect of manuscript traditions upon such names even more interesting. As such this article will explore two slightly different instances of this and consider what this shows about languages in general.

The English town of Salisbury is a brilliant example of the effect medieval scribal practices can have on modern names. Old Sarum is atop a hill about two miles north of modern Salisbury, in Wiltshire. The fort was developed into a fortified town by the Saxons and was called something like Searoburg. This town prospered until a dispute between the civic and religious authorities caused the Bishop to move the church down onto the adjacent plain, and so the descriptive “old” was added to the original settlement, and “new” to what is now Salisbury.

The name Searoburg developed into something like Sarisburie in Middle English. As much of the written organisation, both civic and religious, functioned in Latin, manuscripts frequently used a system of shorthand that had been developed since Tironian Notes which were used in the late Roman Republic. One of the common ways of showing that a word had been contracted was to draw a line over the end of it. As such Sarisburie was shortened to Sar̅.

Yet at the same time a very similar form of contraction was also used which was used as a generic sign that the word had been shortened. A macron on top could also be used to show a missing final nasal consonant (such as n and m) and also common syllables ending in one. This sped up the writing of Latin as the common endings -um and -ium could be shown by a quick line over the stem of a word.

Due to the confusion between these two forms of notation Sar̅ was re-extended falsely as Sarum, perhaps initially by people elsewhere who were not familiar with the spoken full name. It seems this happened at some point in the 13th Century as by the 14th Century the Bishop of Salisbury was describing himself as the episcopus Sarum instead of episcopus Seriberiensis. This is interesting as Sarum is being treated as a Latin name and not altered like Sarisburie into Seriberiensis. In part this might be as Sarum fits Latin morphology for a noun and so Sarum as a Latin based name would not have seemed unusual.

The effect of mistaken reformations of ‘original’ names is far more frequent than one might think. However, this can show the logical fallacies of older times, and so acts as in interesting window into the mentality of such periods. For instance, looking at an old Ordnance Survey map of the Isle of Wight I saw an area called Centurions Copse. I was intrigued and so had a further look.

It might seem that this must have some Roman connection, not unlikely as there was a Roman villa nearby. Yet there is no evidence of any Roman settlement in this position, nor any sign of the toponym before the Victorian era. The actual source of the name seems to be a corruption of the patron saint of a local (now ruined and lost) church. As the earliest mention is of centurion’s Chapel, this quite clearly provides the cent part of the name as an adaptation of saint. The rest of the name is rather less certain as the few sources that name the chapel vary quite significantly.

It is interesting seeing the name St. Urian, attached to the chapel, on early Ordnance Survey maps, from the late 19th century, as there is no saint of that name in any Christian denomination. This instead is an attempted reconstruction of the original saint’s name, and might be influenced by the now somewhat outdated adjective uranic (this tended to be used to mean heavenly, or more generally pertaining to the sky or Uranus, both as a god and planet) which takes its stem from Uranus (ultimately from the Ancient Greek Ουρανός). This combined with the variant spellings of actual Saints, such as St. Urie etc., causes the inaccurate name St. Urian to be used.

Looking at the sources which describe the chapel as being dedicated to a saint one sees a multitude of possible names, St.Urie, St. Uires, St. Uryth. These names all seem to be variant local spellings of the same saint and possibly reflect the different pronunciations of this name at different times. There are two possible saints, known in relevant Christian Denominations, that could be being mentioned here.

The most obvious one is St. Urith who is primarily a Devonian saint. This at first may seem odd as this saint is very little seen in dedications of churches outside of Devon, however the important landowners of the medieval Isle of Wight also held substantial lands in Devon, and so there is a plausible connection to explain what would otherwise be rather odd.

The other possible saint is St. Turien, who is mainly known in Northern France, and might have been brought over by Norman aristocracy. This name does seem to be rather different to the names recorded in most early sources yet is not so different that it is impossible to see how it may have been corrupted into something like St. Uries, this is simpler than it might seem as the name was already quite varied and so might have initially been something like Turies and then due to the elision of the “t” in French pronunciation it was taken into English as saint Uries.

As one can see from these two examples, reconstructions of abbreviated or corrupted forms of place names often show more of the reconstructor’s ideals and belief than the original name. This is one of the many ways in which language can show such detailed aspects of a particular time, and how fluid most languages used to be in regards to spelling and pronunciation.